Linux

Dell is one of the most important providers of Ubuntu-powered hardware, and the company has just released a new laptop called Inspiron 15 3000 Series Laptop Ubuntu Edition.

Companies like Dell or IBM have helped to make Ubuntu much more popular because they sell a lot of hardware, and they are shipping that hardware with Ubuntu preinstalled. It might not seem like a big deal. After all, you can always install something else, but many customers don't switch to a different OS and Ubuntu remains installed.

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The 2015 Linux hacker board survey has arrived. In its second year, this collaboration between Linux.com and LinuxGizmos.com has collected 53 open-spec, community backed SBCs that run Linux and/or Android. Please take a few minutes to fill out our short SurveyMonkey SBC Survey, and select your favorite SBCs, then enter a drawing to become one of 20 randomly chosen participants who receive a free Linux SBC. Farther below, we offer brief summaries of the 53 boards, with links to product pages.

Linux desktop users have two main sets of utilities: KDE's and GNOME's. The GNOME utilities are found in GNOME, MATE, Cinnamon and Unity. Neither KDE nor GNOME has any objective advantage over the other, but the user experiences are so different that they could almost be two different operating systems.

Both utility sets have the same basic features, but each starts with its own concept of what users want. As I have said before, GNOME's utilities are exercises in minimalism, generally designed only for the most common use cases. By contrast, KDE's utilities are completist, typically cramming every possibly related feature into their windows, as well as every possible opportunity for customization.

Arne Exton, the creator of several distributions of GNU/Linux and Android-x86 Live CDs, has updated his LFA (Linux For ALL) distribution recently with a new, custom kernel package and various under-the-hood improvements.

On May 20, Canonical published a new Ubuntu security notice where they've informed users about the immediate availability of a new kernel update for its Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (Trusty Tahr) operating system.

When TrackingPoint first showcased its Linux-powered scopes with tracking assistance that substantially improved rifle accuracy, even in the hands of untrained hunters, it kicked off a controversy over what level of technology was appropriate for hunting or home defense, and whether the company encouraged irresponsible behavior. Now, it seems that debate is coming to an end thanks to imminent financial failure. While the company’s website remains online for now, there’s a new header that notes: “Due to financial difficulty, TrackingPoint will no longer be accepting orders. Thank you to our customers and loyal followers for sharing our vision.”

Dan Berrange, creator of libvirt, sums it up nicely on the Fedora Devel list:

"While you might be able to crash the QEMU process associated with your own guest, you should not be able to escalate from there to take over the host, nor be able to compromise other guests on the same host. The attacker would need to find a second independent security flaw to let them escape SELinux in some manner, or some way to trick libvirt via its QEMU monitor connection. Nothing is guaranteed 100% foolproof, but in absence of other known bugs, sVirt provides good anti-venom for this flaw IMHO."

At the start of 2014, attackers' favorite distributed denial of service attack strategy was to send messages to misconfigured servers with a spoofed return address – the servers would keep trying to reply to those messages, allowing the attackers to magnify the impact of their traffic.

Another HTTPS vulnerability has started to make its rounds earlier this morning. Dubbed Logjam by its researchers, the vulnerability stems from the US's encryption export mandate back in the 1990s. This particular vulnerability, in the transport-layer security layer protocol, breaks the Diffie-Hellman perfect forward-secrecy. Susceptibility to the vulnerability is depended on servers and clients supporting the DHE_EXPORT encryption scheme, or using a key less-than-or-equal to 1024 bits.

Linux containers have been around for several years, but have come back into vogue recently with the growing popularity of Docker containers.

Docker containers launched with the aim of making it easy for developers to test and distribute applications and have taken off with a bang: Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Joyent have all announced ways to integrate and manage multiple Docker containers into their offerings.

One of the most crucial pieces of any UNIX-like operating system is the init dæmon process. In Linux, this process is started by the kernel, and it's the first userspace process to spawn and the last one to die during shutdown.

During the history of UNIX and Linux, many init systems have gained popularity and then faded away. In this article, I focus on the history of the init system as it relates to Linux, and I talk about the role of init in a modern Linux system. I also relate some of the history of the System V Init (SysV) scheme, which was the de facto standard for many Linux distributions for a long time. Then I cover a couple more modern approaches to system initialization, such as Upstart and systemd. Finally, I pay some attention to how things work in systemd, as this seems to be the popular choice at the moment for several of the largest distributions.

More in Tux Machines

WhiteSource Rolls Out New Open Source Security Detector

WhiteSource on Tuesday launched its next-generation software composition analysis (SCA) technology, dubbed "Effective Usage Analysis," with the promise that it can reduce open source vulnerability alerts by 70 percent.
The newly developed technology provides details beyond which components are present in the application. It provides actionable insights into how components are being used. It also evaluates their impact on the security of the application.
The new solution shows which vulnerabilities are effective. For instance, it can identify which vulnerabilities get calls from the proprietary code.

Announcing “e Foundation” for eelo

I’m pleased to announce that a non-profit organization has been incorporated to support the project: e Foundation.
“e Foundation” will host core eelo assets and fuel the development of eelo software.
This non-profit organization will be able to receive private and public grants, as well as donations from individuals, from anywhere in the world. We’re also working to add a legal way so that donations could benefit from tax cuts, as it’s often possible when donating to “in the public interest” organizations.
As soon as a bank account will be ready for “e Foundation”, we will move there all donations and our “in demand” crowdfunding campaign.

RIP Robin "Roblimo" Miller

Linux Journal has learned fellow journalist and long-time voice of the Linux community Robin "Roblimo" Miller has passed away. Miller was perhaps best known by the community for his roll as Editor in Chief of Open Source Technology Group, the company that owned Slashdot, SourceForge.net, freshmeat, Linux.com, NewsForge, and ThinkGeek from 2000 to 2008. He went on to write and do video interviews for FOSS Force, penned articles for several publications, and authored three books, The Online Rules of Successful Companies, Point & Click Linux!, and Point & Click OpenOffice.org, all published by Prentice Hall.

The open source, Linux based “AsteroidOS” alternative to Wear OS arrives in a stable 1.0 release, and Block spins off some of its Android smartwatch stack as an open source OpenWatch Project.
The AsteroidOS project has released version 1.0 of its open source, Linux-based smartwatch distribution. Designed for after-market installation on “Wear OS by Google” (formerly Android Wear) watches, AsteroidOS can now be dual booted on seven different models. The release follows the late March announcement of an OpenWatch Project for building Android based open source custom ROMs on Wear OS watches.

Purism has published their nearly final specifications on their limited-run Librem 5 Dev Kit. The cutoff for ordering a developer kit is next week as they are placing their hardware order and planning on only this single, limited run of the developer kit prior to the phones becoming available next year.
Their deadline for ordering a developer kit is the end of the month and the kit price has raised to $399 USD. In the process, Purism believes they are still on track for their January 2019 for coming up with having the phone's actual hardware ready.